The present disclosure relates generally to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for a building. The present disclosure relates more particularly to systems and methods for automatically establishing relationships between sensors and actuation devices in a building HVAC system.
Building HVAC systems typically include many different sensors and actuation devices. The sensors measure various environmental variables (e.g., temperature, humidity, air flow, etc.) and provide sensor readings to a controller. In a feedback control system, a controller uses the sensor readings to generate appropriate control signals for the actuation devices (e.g., chillers, boilers, valves, actuators, etc.) which operate to affect the environmental variables measured by the sensors. Some buildings have hundreds of sensors and actuation devices. It can be cumbersome, error prone, and time consuming to manually identify the associations between sensors and their corresponding actuation devices. Additionally, buildings evolve over time which can change existing relationships between sensors and actuation devices. For example, remodeling a building can break existing relationships between paired sensors and actuation devices or create new relationships that did not previously exist.
Some building HVAC systems record time series data (e.g., trend data, historical data, etc.) for various measured or calculated variables. Time series data can be used for many purposes including, for example, fault detection, benchmarking, executing queries, and other data analysis applications. Some data analysis applications compare two or more time series as part of the analysis. However, it can be difficult to compare time series to each other due to dimensional mismatches resulting from different sampling rates, different units of measurement, and other factors. Without the ability to accurately compare time series data, performing actions such as finding similar trends, executing queries on a broad data set, running diagnostic algorithms, conducting benchmarking, reporting on compliance across portfolio of systems or buildings, and other actions can be challenging.